St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘web publishing’ Category

View the new version of the Florida Photo Gallery

Florida Photo Gallery gets a long needed makeover.

by Texx Smith

The oldest of my oldest websites that still live is Florida Photo Gallery.  Photography has long been a passion of mine and this website used to be a source of pride for me.  The photos there were always nice, and the web site itself used to be  a thing of beauty and a showcase of cutting edge HTML and CSS technology.  It was one of the first websites in thew world to used CSS to create “rollover buttons” that used CSS instead of images to create the rollover effect and it also had an ingenious script that detected your monitor size and served a background image of a size based on the size of your monitor.  The latter was the forefathers of our much imitated,  Responsive Design technology in fact.

The new version of the website isn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it does use several cutting edge technologies which provides several features for us and the user:

• AJAX and CSS animated page transitions

• We’re talking subtle ones that work in any modern web browser, not the old school Internet Explorer only stuff.

• In an instantly (no loading time) appearing lightbox that automatically scaled to the screen size
• In a full blown article, for those who like to know the story behind the photo.

• Including a search feature, of course

It’s an important questions for web designers and web design managers. Especially when it come to the more specific question of Which version Of Internet Explorer (IE) are people using.
Nowadays with the advent of HTML 5 being released into the wild and CSS 3 being released into the wild, both before they are even finished by the way, it’s important to know which features you can use in your web designs because most of these new features don’t work in all browsers.

If you turn to Google for the answer to this question you’ll most likely be pointed to a one of the big tech websites like twocows.com or something and there you’ll see an old or a newer chart that shows how many people visited the web site and what browser they were using.  The problem is that they are a tech web site visited by Technical people.  Technical people on tech web sites are far more likely to use web browsers likely Firefox and Opera and less likely web browsers like IE and Chrome because of the security and social issues involved.  (IE is part of a scheme to monopolize the world computer and internet technology, while Chrome is too, it’s also actively defrauds advertisers by making all typed in addresses count as click on an advertisement when it wasn’t.)

So we checked our clients websites, We tried to get a wide sampling of “typical”web sites that have mostly U.S. Based web traffic; we are using fresh (last 30 days), combined data from several web sites and averaged it together and then rounded the results to the nearest whole percentage point:

Here’s what we found (to protect the clients, we are used percentages, not raw numbers):

Browsers:

• IE: 47%
  • The IE browsers by version as a percentage of IE users, not as a percentage of all users:
  • IE 9: 10%
  • IE 8: 65%
  • IE 7: 17%
  • IE 6: 3%
  • IE 5.5: 0%
• Firefox: 17% Continue reading “Which Browsers and Devices are Used the Most?” »

With methodology that’s typical of both Microsoft and the GOP, these two spent millions making and promoting this huge web application that proports to be just what the people want, ( a “virtual town hall meeting”) which doesn’t work and isn’t what it says it is…

For the record I am NOT a Democrat nor a Republican and I am, like most Americans NOT happy with either party.  This story is not about politics, but instead about what happens when you don’t plan, test and launch a web application successfully.  further this article will speak a little about honesty in marketing.  Any comments that try to say that I’m saying these thing because I don’t agree with the politics of the web site will not be published, as will any comments that rant about one political viewpoint or party.  We welcome all comments that focus on the marketing or technical aspects of this web application.

First we’ll address the “doesn’t work” part, then after the fold we’ll address the part where it isn’t what it says it is.

On the first day I heard of it, I went to check it out. It displayed nothing but a blank screen. I checked the source code, there was the complete source code for a blank html page. Well stuff happens I guess. So I checked back a few hours later, same thing. So I tried in the wee hours of the morning, same thing.  I don’t know how they think this is okay, but if this was my web application, it would have been ready for the massive amount of traffic on launch day, it would have been thoroughly tested before release and any errors that somehow made it through this process would have been fixed promptly.  If not, my efforts would be considered and absolute failure. Given the GOP and Microsoft have access to so many more resources than me, these failures are completely unacceptable.

Now it’s three days later and I go there and, lo and behold, we get a front page. But that’s all. All the pages linked to on this page, return the famous asp.net error screen (which some say is a huge security hole in asp.net web applications). See screen shot above.
There is a video on the front page. It does work. Sadly it’s hosted by youtube and has all Google’s tracking systems intact. Really? The GOP can’t afford to and Microsoft doesn’t have the know how to host it’s own video? They really think it’s okay to give up all that info on it’s users just to avoid hosting their own video?  BTW, youtube.com is owned by Google which is Microsoft’s #1 competitor.  I’d have to say that using youtube to host this particular video on this particular web site and Epic Fail, wouldn’t you?
The video goes on and on about how they want the public’s input on policy. The info the founder (Kevin McCarthy) released to the press used the phrase “virtual town hall meeting”. The site couldn’t be anything further from that. But it is designed to make it look like one.
Here’s some of the differences between a town hall meeting and this web application:
Continue reading “Microsoft and GOP team up to Fail” »

Bubbles! Everyone loves bubbles! Okay, maybe not everyone, but I don’t think anyone hates bubbles do they?

Blue Bubbles is a free WordPress Theme from out St Petersburg Web Design team.  The central area is 900 pixels wide, with two columns inside.  It has a horizontal drop down menu.  In fact it’s our special “easy use” drop down menu which eliminates the “mouse chase” effect which make so many drop down difficult to use because the menu disappears unless the mouse isn’t in exactly the right spot.

This is the download page for this free WordPress theme and also the support page.  It’s a pretty straight forward theme, like most of our themes.  Which means it’s easy to use and customize.  Just install it like normal and edit it like one normally would.   If you do have questions, please just post them as comments below.  Links and terms after the jump . . .

Continue reading “Free WordPress Theme – Blue Bubbles” »

Everyone knows that cPanel is the hands down, the most effective, most reliable, most feature rich and the most common Web hosting control panel.

Nope, no they don’t.  I’ve heard for the second time in a year, someone say they’ve never used cPanel for a web hosting control panel.  In both times these were fairly bright guys, these were fairly experienced guys.  Neither was really responsible for choosing a web host ever before though.  Both had also worked mostly at larger corporations.  Yet they had never heard of WHM (Web Host Manager) either.  WHM is the multi-domain to entire server level software. sometimes it’s hard for the open source software to compete against the giants like Microsoft in advertising. Even with this disadvantage, cPanel is used on over 1000 times as many web sites as Microsoft technologies.

That’s okay.  If you’ve never tried cPanel you really should.  It really is the most complete hosting management software out there.

Here’s some of the great features and unique features: Continue reading “Why CPanel?” »

Today we announce a new theme. This one isn’t just a WordPress Theme, it’s also been ported form many other content management systems and even a plain HTML/CSS version.

Simple and clean, the Desert Sage Theme has two columns, has a fixed width of 1000 pixels and has clean color scheme of light browns. It has a Search Engine friendly text Headline and Tag line space in the header.

• Drupal
• Joomla
• HTML
• DotNetNuke

Support, download and preview links after the fold below:
Continue reading “Free Theme – Desert Sage” »